Sequencing of Concurrent Communication Traffic in a Mesh Multicomputer with Virtual Channels

Under the fixed-path e-cube routing in mesh multicomputers, we evaluate the performance of several low-overhead packet sequencing and flit multiplexing methods. In the presence of concurrent inter-node communication traffic, we found that unless proper packet sequencing is employed, adding more communication resources, such as links and buffers, can actually degrade the network performance. A good packet-sequencing policy combined with proper flit multiplexing is shown to improve performance by more than 30%.